Thesis Example: Animate Pillow Project

By selectively focusing on the details of movement and gesture over true-to-life reproduction, animators create a stronger emotional bond with their audiences by allowing people the visual space to enrich the animation with their own experiences.

Photorealistic animation does not leave enough visual white space for people to project their imaginations into in order to fill in the discrepancies between what they see and what they experience as real. Because of this the audience is denied access to the emotional projection and anthropomorphism that effectively creates empathy in animation. By selectively focusing on details of movement and gesture, animators create a stronger emotional bond with their audience by allowing people to enrich the animation with their own experiences. Relying on this, applicants at Disney are asked to submit animations of a sack of flour expressing various emotions as part of their reel as a test of their abilties to take something so blank and featureless as a pillow and imbue it with life. Playing off this idea, I propose that effective empathy can be attained with animatronics using the same basic elements: anthropomorphism, emotional projection, and the gestures and motion that can be achieved with a pillow -- as opposed to the standard robotic approaches which feature either extreme realism in the appearance of an living creature, or focus on multiple degrees of facial articulation.

Source:

Riley, Phaedra. "Animate Pillow Project". ITP Thesis Presentations. May 2005. New York. April, 2007 http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/spring2005/detail.php?project_id=198